Stephen King is working with Dennis Calero to publish a free, weekly eComic entitled "Little Green God of Agony." Readers can check it out on his website. Over at PopMatters, Dominic Umilelooks closely at the comic’s emergence, as well as the author’s interest in the horror comics genre.

This week in beautiful books: Eugène Delacroix once illustratedGoethe’s Faust, and Goethe himself claimed the resulting lithographs "surpassed my own vision." A full version of the work is now available online. And in a slightly more light-hearted vein, English Russia has found and scanned a delightful Soviet version of The Hobbit, complete with a Gollum straight out of Dr. Seuss.

"I learned through imitation, but it was only when I followed—or found—my own voice that I was able to derive a different kind of inspiration from reading fiction, something subtler and more expansive. Today, when I reach a wall in my own work, I turn to authors I love to remind myself what is possible: that sentence, that structure, that daring twist of plot." Chloe Benjamin, who just yesterday published a piece on choosing book titles for The Millions, writes about the dangers and rewards of reading while writing for Poets and Writers' Recommends series.

Tom Hanks’s debut collection of short stories is due out in October. “The theme of the collection will be typewriters,” reports The Guardian, “with each tale involving one of these more and more scarce machines.”

Must female characters always stand in the shadow of the institution of marriage? Ivan Kreilkamp writes on female bachelors, from Renata Adler’sSpeedboat to Elizabeth Hardwick’sSleepless Nights. Pair with this Millions essay on Adler’s piecemeal novel.